For years, reaching the Port of Abidjan – the main export terminal in the commercial capital of Côte d’Ivoire, or Ivory Coast – would involve long waits along grid-locked, poorly-designed roads. The port and its surrounding areas are also considered vulnerable to flooding, given the land’s low elevation and the lack of a workable drainage in some areas, as well as rising sea levels and intensifying rain storms along the West African coast.
A $536 million (£399m) investment programme that ran from 2019 to 2025 has, however, boosted the area’s storm tolerance and completely transformed port access, with critical roads and a bridge rehabilitated as well as a key industrial zone. Supported by an engineering company that seeks to prioritise climate resilience and sustainability in projects in emerging markets, road users now report fast-moving traffic and rainwater that now easily drains away, helping ensure that this key economic asset will remain viable as the world warms.
What is curious about this project that has made Côte d’Ivoire better-adapted to the escalating climate crisis is that it was signed off by US public development agency the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC) during the first administration of avowed climate skeptic Donald Trump. What’s more, while Trump halted funding for aid projects around the world during the first few months of his second term, his administration decided to fund Côte d’Ivoire partnership until its completion after an initial period of uncertainty. The project’s successes, including its ability to “outlast rain”, are now highlighted on MCC’s website.
The story of the Port of Abidjan is not alone. The Independent has found that the Trump administration is continuing to pour billions of dollars into climate-friendly projects that are helping countries invest in everything from coastal resilience and renewable power grid infrastructure, to critical mineral supply chains that are crucial for solar and wind power.
The investments show how climate action is now more or less “built-in” to global economic activity, regardless of any one country’s particular political agenda.
“A project may be justified politically in terms of energy security, competitiveness, infrastructure, agricultural productivity or supply-chain resilience, while still having clear climate implications,” says Martin Koehring, from the think tank ODI Global. “That reflects the fact that climate risks and transition dynamics are increasingly embedded in the real economy.”
“The low-carbon transition is now deeply wired into the economy, investment patterns, industrial innovation and technological development,” agrees Patrick Schroeder, from Chatham House. “It can be slowed, distorted and made more costly by Trump’s hostile policy, but it cannot be stopped altogether, even by an aggressively anti-climate administration.”
There is no denying that in most areas, Trump has had a profoundly negative impact on global climate efforts. As well as removing the US from a key global climate treaty – the Paris Agreement – he has defunded institutions producing climate research, and reversed climate and rulings like the so-called “Endangerment Finding”, which served as the legal foundation for federal regulations around climate and pollution. Overseas, the effective closure of the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) has also gutted pools of climate money that were already far smaller than what is required to meet the challenge of the climate crisis.
But among those aid agencies that escaped the knife, a more positive climate story can be found.
For months, many observers feared that MCC, an agency that supports country-led development programmes through national “compacts,” would also be shuttered. In the end, a number of countries’ agreements were indeed discontinued, but among those cited as ongoing in MCC’s 2026 annual report, there are several that clearly align with tackling the climate crisis.
Beyond Côte d’Ivoire, a $550m compact in Senegal focuses upgrades to the national electricity grid, which is set to help support the rapid expansion of solar and wind energy (up from 5.7 to 17.3 per cent of generation between 2019 and 2023) and the replacement of coal with cleaner-burning gas-fired power plants. A separate $550m compact in Nepal will similarly support a power system that is largely renewable (66 per cent hydropower). A $350m compact with Mongolia, meanwhile, has boosted water availability in the capital of Ulaanbaatar: a city grappling with a water crisis driven by rapid urbanisation and climate change. That is in a country where temperatures are rising at three-times the global average rate.
A $202m MCC compact that is backing the rehabilitation of the Cotonou-Niamey transport corridor in Benin, meanwhile, is required in large part because of the road’s long-term deterioration resulting from heavy rainfall and extreme heat. Another $202m deal with Kosovo will support the development of large-scale battery systems – crucial for the country’s long-term transition to renewables – while the US government has also confirmed continued support for a $500m agreement supporting coastal resilience in Mozambique, which is a country facing increasingly intense cyclones and flooding events.
MCC has also signed new compacts under Trump, including a new $300m programme to support an electricity grid in Côte d’Ivoire that is experiencing booming growth in low-cost solar power. It is also in ongoing development discussions with Fiji, the Solomon Islands, and Tonga: small-island developing states that are among the most climate vulnerable places in the world, where any new infrastructure or economic partnership is likely to integrate climate resilience.
Emily Wilkinson, a small island states specialist at ODI Global, says that while the intention in these countries might be “soft power” in a geopolitically contested region, in the end, any kind of development investment is going to have to encompass climate resilience. “You cannot really separate the two in this part of the world,” she tells The Independent. These Pacific islands are suffering hugely from both more extreme weather events like cyclones, Wilkinson adds, as well as slow onset changes resulting from sea level rises.
MCC has also been looking to expand further into Liberia and Mozambique, with a key focus on large reserves of critical minerals like gold, lithium, and cobalt that the two countries hold. However, while Trump’s government is keen to make clear that securing critical mineral supply chains is critical for national ambitions including the expansion of data centres, new military hardware, and strategic competition with China, most independent analysts agree that demand for many critical mineral is set to largely be driven by something that the president is less keen to promote: the expansion of clean energy technologies.
The growth in demand for lithium, nickel, cobalt, and graphite in 2024, up 85 per cent, was driven by the energy sector, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA), with these metals needed in the develop of energy storage systems that are required to take full advantage of renewables like solar and wind. Growth in demand for rare earths and copper was also largely driven by clean energy applications and power grid expansions, the IEA finds, while JP Morgan Global Research has said that of the 16 per cent growth in global lithium needs expected in 2026, 58 per cent is set to come from electric vehicles and 30 per cent is set to come from energy storage systems.
“National security uses of critical minerals are extremely important, but they are also not really big enough to drive a market – so you need electric vehicles and clean energy uses to ensure demand,” says Bella Tonkology, a senior director at the Climate Policy Initiative think tank. “Renewable energy and electric vehicle uptake globally is also continuing to grow year-on-year, and that genie is not being put back in the bottle.”
Trump’s push for critical minerals can all be seen in his support for another US international development agency, the Development Finance Corporation (DFC), which was reauthorised at the end of last year with a massive $145 billion boost to its portfolio investment cap. That reauthorisation included a directive that more public money can now be invested in middle-income countries and infrastructure projects, bolstering US ambitions to become a competitor to China’s longstanding “belt and road” initiative across Africa and beyond.
Projects listed on the DFC website as approved for 2026 also have a clear climate and sustainability benefit, including $475,000 committed to an organisation supporting microfinance in the Philippines, which is a financial system considered vital to assisting climate-vulnerable communities adapt to the climate crisis. There are also loans for projects extracting critical minerals that are vital to the energy transition, including for one rare earths mine in Brazil that has a “commitment to make sustainability integral to every decision and action we take”. Representatives for the mine declined to comment for this article. The DFC is also currently in the process of considering whether to support two major wind generation projects in North Macedonia and Egypt, according to documents on the bank’s website.
“Energy-price instability, particularly for fossil fuels, is pushing more actors toward renewables and diversified energy supply,” suggests Jocilyn Estes, from the Center for Global Development (CGD). The current geopolitical backdrop, particularly in the context of volatile oil prices stemming from war in Iran, is likely catalysing support for lower cost and more reliable renewable projects regardless of any directive from the top, she adds.
The DFC has also reinstated its support for a Joe Biden-era mega-infrastructure project, the Lobito Corridor, securing a $553m loan from the agency in December 2025. The project involves the rehabilitation of a 1,289km railway corridor that runs from the copperbelt of Chingola in Zambia, through the cobalt- and copper-rich forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, all the way to the port of Port of Lobito, Angola. It is set to boost the availability of core materials required for clean energy technologies like solar, wind, and electric vehicles.
Climate resilience is understandably also being built into the heart of the Lobito Corridor, given developers’ intention of keeping the economic asset functioning for many years to come. The DFC website itself describes how roads are set to be made more resilient to threats including wet weather, while other development organisations working around the corridor explicitly mention a focus on climate resilience. This need was evident in April of this year, when heavy rains – an event increasingly common in Southern Africa with climate change – led rivers near the stations of Cubal and Caimbambo in Angola to burst their banks, temporarily forcing operators to suspend railway line operations.
Elsewhere, the Export-Import Bank of the United States – or EXIM Bank – has for decades helped US businesses export their goods by assuming some of the risk when private lenders are unwilling to do so. After years of gradually tightening its environmental standards, the bank took a sharp turn in May 2025, when Trump lifted a 12-year moratorium on coal financing, making it one of the only major export credit agencies in the world willing to finance new coal-fired power projects.
However, more than a year later, there is little sign that this has translated into a major new era for global coal, irrespective of Trump’s hopes. Website filings suggest that the numbers of fossil fuel projects backed by both the EXIM Bank and the DFC are comparable to the numbers seen under the Biden administration.
“Given how many countries have already moved away from coal, even if the door is now open to investment, it doesn’t mean we’ll necessarily see bankable coal projects deals that deliver both strategically and financially,” suggests CGD’s Estes.
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